Mists of Salamira

Arcane orders of Salamira

Wizard schools, universities and formal education of magic altogether are almost non-existent in the kingdom, just as the formal education of a conventional sense is missing too. This way, the practice of arcane magic can be divided into three distinct types, methods and origins.

The Arcane College of the Royal Hall

The most conventional one that is quite similar to the one we might expect from wizards’ education is the Arcane College of the Royal Hall. This, being the single university of the land, is the only school of wizardry and magic in the traditional sense – yet most arcane casters do not claim that the school would be their intellectual cradle.

The college only accepts nobility and, on rare occasions, talented commoners who are recommended by at least a duke as apprentices. After their first year at the Royal Hall, the students are called hall servants until they finish their 12 years at the academy. After that they attain the rank of royal wizards and set out to build their careers around aiding the nobility.

Game info.
Royal wizards do not have the restrictions and possibilities described for the wizards of Salamira. What players of the royal wizards get instead is the comfort of a familiar setting for studying magic and an access to all known spells to copy to their spellbook. Each new spell in their book comes at a certain price, though, determined by the wizard’s political standing among the Royal Hall hierarchy, the desired spell’s power and its relative danger to the people.
The rank of an apprentice means someone who is at level 1; hall servant is for characters between level 2 and 5; those titled royal wizards are at least level 6.

The Monolith Circles

Hidden in dense wilderness of Salamira there are twelve gargantuan standing stones with curious runes carved all over them. It is said that they have already been there, reaching for the sky and stars when the first Salamirans arrived to the Hand of the Creator and nobody knows how they had been erected or by whom.

But there are some initiates who know that the mysterious runes each represent a single spell and after fully understanding the rune’s deeper meaning and symbolism, one becomes able to use that spell on a regular basis. They also know that each obelisk has mostly different spells and those spells usually represent a certain field of study – such as fire spells, necromancy, protective magic and so on. These initiates are the hedge wizards and they represent an arcane spellcasting tradition that’s native and unique to Salamira.

Hedge wizards generally do not build towers; instead, they each live with their fellow wizards around a certain monolith in what are called arcane settlements, surrounded by common townsfolk who tend to their everyday needs, often sharing their villages with druids who protect and care for sacred glades nearby. They all spend at least some of their time with the study and protection of the monoliths and its runes; their magical prowess suffers if they fail or miss doing so.

They are not restricted to a certain obelisk though, thus they usually travel in between two or three arcane settlements that are relatively close to each other. This is not only relatively common but also becomes necessary as this is the only way for the hedge wizards to broaden their magical repertoire.

As the Royal Hall is really selective not only of its students, but also of its clientele, and is at most times depressingly laden with institutional politics, people usually choose the local monolith circle if they need any help with a problem. The popularity of the hedge wizards increased greatly after the First Falling had been solved and cleansed almost solely by hedge wizards. It’s also an understatement that unintentionally they also managed to earn the jealousy of the royal wizards…

The practicioners of pact magic will be called warlocks once they become widely known. For the moment, they are relatively newcomers to Salamira and as the first of their kind appeared right after the First Falling, they are not exactly welcome.

It seems people made certain connections between the two phenomenon, unfortunately, and these aren't particularly flattering toward them. Not yet persecuted but already feared, a path of a warlock is usually a solitary one.